


Enough

by DoubleNegative



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Love, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Second Chances, Second War with Voldemort, but if we're being generous we can call it a, not really a fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-04-25 12:40:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4960999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleNegative/pseuds/DoubleNegative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't have a future together, but they don't have a future apart, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

If he is honest with himself--and Remus Lupin is always honest with himself, in the hopes that it will make up for a lifetime of keeping secrets from others--he knows they do not have a future together.

They also don’t have a future apart.

It was sheer luck that he survived the first Wizarding War; he cannot bring himself to hope that he will survive the second. He is the old guard and Tonks is the new, and he knows very well with whom the future lies. He also knows that having him at her side does not increase Tonks’s chances, not in the slightest.

But still--he is selfish and she is beautiful. She has Sirius’s eyes, it’s true, but she is a Metamorphmagus--she has everyone else’s eyes too, and that makes it bearable. It is much better than that, in fact, and for hours, even days at a time, they can forget the darkness bearing down on them. After so many lonely years of mourning, Tonks’s hands are a revelation. Beneath her lips, her fingertips, his scars fade, and it’s a wandless, spell-less sort of magic he’d forgotten the world held. 

He is still too old for her, too dangerous and too poor. But when they sit together at their kitchen table, hands wrapped around chipped mugs of tea, or when she stands before the mirror shifting through hair colors and styles with no more effort than a blink, Remus finds it hard to put much stock in those things.

They may not have a future together, but they do have a present--and that, Remus is learning, can be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> As I mentioned in the tags, this is... not really a story, in the narrative sense. A character study, perhaps, if we'd like to be generous (or pretentious) about it. I wrote it awhile back, and kept hoping it would blossom into something larger--but alas, it hasn't (and at this point, probably won't). But there are a few bits of it I like, and to be totally honest, I need the boost of posting _something_ while I slog through this Johnlock AU that I've apparently decided needs a plot _and_ chapters, wtf.
> 
> Anyway, I love Remus Lupin to distraction, and I applaud his taste in partners: that is to say, wise-arse Black family blood traitors (to shamelessly steal a descriptor from someone on Tumblr). If you also love Remus Lupin and wise-arse Black family blood traitors, come see me [on Tumblr](http://www.onethousandhurrahs.tumblr.com/), and we can cry over them together.


End file.
